Add a timeout when talking to gobbie box, home points etc

[radar]

If you talk to a gobbie box (seems to happen most often with this for some reason), home point or anything else with a prompt and you get a little bit of lag at that moment you get locked in place at that npc.

The game is still running, people are still running around you but your character becomes locked in place. You cannot escape from the NPC you talked to in any way, because lag interfered with the data that the server is supposed to send to instigate the conversation.

The only way to escape this is to literally hard crash the game (and if you're not technical enough to do that, turn off the pc).

This happens very infrequently, maybe less than 1% but it does happen.

An easy fix for this I would guess, is to just add a timeout to gobbie box and all warp npc.

At least a couple of times a week I have this happen with gobbie box and have to crash the instance (I have a lot of characters, so I multiply the the chances of it happening by a lot).

[Uroah]

Oh the lovely "invisible menu", how I love that.

I can't describe how much I adore having to crash the game and log back in. It's my absolute favorite thing.

[Dragoy]

I've experienced the described hang quite often in recent times, usually with home-points, but indeed, sometimes with the junk goblins as well. Not sure if it's a global network issue, or something due to the SqEX server changes, or/and my ISP being crud, but I dare say it does happen pretty often these days.

As for the suggested fix, it's not clear to me if you mean a kind of a hard timeout on a conversation with an NPC, or something with regards to the execution of it?

The former I'd understand as something along the lines of the game client "disconnecting" from the conversation, hard, after a period of time. This would probably need some really good checks for it to not "disconnect" hard at the wrong time, leading into loss of items or/and progression.

As for the player-side workaround, a less hammer-like solution I've used is suspend the process for ~1 minute, which will lead into being disconnected from the game, but only as far as to the character selection/title screen when resuming so I don't even need to log in again. I'm running on Linux though, and don't know/remember how simple that might be on other operating systems.

Sometimes that does lead into a someawhats funky state in resuming, where I can move around as normal, and everything else seems to be like normal, but interacting with /any/ NPC will lead to the hang again until I go back all the way to the PlayOnline viewer, and start the conversation with the server again (or a different server) by re-entering the game.

[Gwydion]

I have experienced this issue as well. It can happen anywhere in game. The issue is the server response to your NPC interaction is dropped. The nature of traffic between you and the server is lossy, with no guaranteed delivery. So, this issue is always possible unfortunately.

How to fix it? Or prevent it permanently? I have no idea.